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Crowd Sourcing Evidence Hunters: Sense About Science
Every day, we hear claims about what is good for our health, bad for the environment, how to improve education, cut crime, and treat disease. Some of these claims are based on reliable evidence and scientific rigour. Many are not. These claims can't be regulated; every time one is debunked another pops up – like a game of whack-a-mole. So how can we make companies, politicians, commentators and official bodies accountable for the claims they make? If they want us…
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Why the Compass Needle Points North
Magnetic compasses may have been used by the Chinese as early as the first century AD, and natural magnets were known to the Greeks in classical times. The first scientific treatise ever written is generally recognised as being Petrius Peregrinus’ geomagnetic text ‘Epistola de Magnete’ in 1269. This was followed in 1600 by ‘De Magnete’ by William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, who wrote (in Latin!) that ‘the Earth globe itself is a great magnet’. Among other famous names…
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Petri-Dishing the Dirt: Astrobiology down a North-Yorkshire Mine
Is there life on Mars? Lets go down a mine to find out!..Wait, what? Just outside of Whitby and 1,100 metres underground in the Boulby Underground Laboratory, Jennifer Wadsworth, a PhD physics student at the University of Edinburgh is researching how microbes can survive down there and how they might exist in similar extreme environments like on Mars. She's also using the Boulby caverns to test equipment that will be sent on the future 'ExoMars' Martian Rover mission to the…
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If You Say ‘um’, You’re Lying
What is it about the way that someone speaks that makes you think they’re lying? In this talk, Martin present a series of experiments looking at speech disfluency (“um or er”) and how it affects listeners’ judgements. In particular, he shows that judgements are affected *fast*: Listeners may have made their minds up long before the speaker has even got to the “lying” bit of what they’re saying. He goes on to explore the basis of listeners’ judgements: Are they…
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